Tim O'Brien (author)

"'Well, I still don't get it,' she said. 'The way you talk, it sounds calculating or something. Too cold. Planning every tiny detail.' 'And that's bad?' 'No. Not exactly.' 'What then?' She made a shift…"

"I would go to the war — I would kill and maybe die — because I was embarrassed not to. That was the sad thing. And so I sat in the bow of the boat and cried."

"You were a treasonous pussy if you had second thoughts about killing and dying for plain and simple reasons."

"They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing — these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weigh…"

"We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate by hypothesis, by daydream, by scientific investigation those leaden walls that encase the human spirit, t…"

"Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes…"

"For example, we've all heard this one. Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his three buddies. Is it true? The answer matters. You'd feel c…"

"The way I see it, he came back pretty shattered, pretty fucked up, then he got married to Kathy and they had this really great love thing going. Never saw two people so feelie-grabbie. So he gets his …"